"Obvious Child" doesn't carry itself like an important movie. It's a well-written rom-com with rascally charm, a modest story of an awkward Brooklyn girl making a go of life. It's irreverent and rough around the edges with an imperfect protagonist, blue language, scatological humor and rambling confessional stand-up monologues, sometimes about bodily fluids. The laughs are frequent and ribald.

In those ways, "Obvious Child" is like a thousand lovingly crafted indie films that came before it. And its romantic beats are every bit as familiar, except in director and writer Gillian Robespierre's debut feature film, the key step between meet-cute and happily ever after is a trip to the abortion clinic.

Stand-up comic and "Saturday Night Live" alumna Jenny Slate is as sweet as she is filthy in her first starring role as Donna Stern, a stand-up comic who works in a Brooklyn book store that's soon going out of business. She's a romantic heroine for the rest of us, a petite Jewish girl with frizzy hair and no savings account, bouncing between her divorced parents' respective apartments in a pair of orange Crocs — supportive goofball dad (Richard Kind) and more demanding, if no less loving, type-A professor mom (Polly Draper) — as she navigates the pains of early adulthood and uses her 780 SAT verbal score to tell diarrhea jokes.

She turns into a total hot mess after getting mercilessly dumped by her boyfriend, who's been sleeping with Donna's pretty blonde friend on the side. She wallows in self pity, guzzling wine by the mason jar and engaging in some "light" stalking of her ex beau. After she bombs a stand-up gig, she recovers from the humility with an adult beverage or five.

In this inebriated state of compromised judgment, she chats up Max (Jake Lacy), who couldn't be any less her type. Lantern-jawed with a button-up shirt and side part, and as good-natured as a golden retriever, Max charms Donna back to his place, where they drunkenly dance in their undies to the beat of those unmistakable drums on Paul Simon's "Obvious Child."

One missed period and a pregnancy test later, Donna find out she's pregnant. She can't take care of herself, never mind another wholly dependent human being, so she heads to her local Planned Parenthood and schedules an abortion — for Valentine's Day.

It's a topic rarely broached in the movies. Which is weird, considering that abortion has been a legal procedure for more than 40 years in the United States, where roughly 1.2 million abortions are performed annually. It's weirder still that "Obvious Child" doesn't make a big deal of it. Instead, it normalizes the incredibly common experience.

"Obvious Child" perhaps embraces the awkward a bit too much, at least in its deference to scatological humor, as we're treated to not one but two uncomfortably long close-ups of stepped-in dog feces, as if to prove a point. There's also a too-long, unbearably awkward encounter with David Cross and rebuffed romantic overtures that feels like a misplaced improv skit.

But the messiness gives texture to a confident film about life's messiness. Your nice shoes will get messed up. You'll make a mess of your underwear. You might even accidentally get pregnant. Donna's strength is that she laughs along with life, and gets us to laugh along with her, whether or not she's performing on stage.

It would be wrong to label "Obvious Child" an abortion movie. This isn't an agenda film, it's a romantic comedy. It hits all of the expected beats: girl gets dumped; girl meets new guy; girl almost blows it; girl gets the guy.